The last thing you want when it comes to scary films is something that’s had money lavished on it. You don’t want a famous director, and you certainly don’t want a big star, their exec-producer-status ensuring their make-up never gets smudged. You want something that looks cheap, smells cheap and is packed with cheap thrills. Something like Ginger Snaps is what you want. The plot is as straightforward as it is cheeky, taking the old werewolf myth and glossing it with the anxieties of a pretty young girl (played by Katharine Isabelle, 12 years before she’d turn up in the equally cult American Mary) as she is visited by her first period. Being a good looking girl, Ginger is a magnet for the local boys, and also in the picture is Ginger’s oh-so-proud mother, wanting to know every detail of her daughter’s haemoglobular progress into womanhood – a fact that’s almost as unwelcome to Ginger as the large hairy beast that she recently encountered out in the woods and which is now making her behave like a wild thing. And if that sounds sexual, it’s not me that started it. As cult horror goes, here’s one that’s corny, funny, squirm-inducing, low rent and pre-menstrually tense.

Trivia: Two death-obsessed sisters, outcasts in their suburban neighborhood, must deal with the tragic consequences when one of them is bitten by a deadly werewolf.

Storyline
Is becoming a woman analogous, in some deep psychological way, to becoming a werewolf? Ginger is 16, edgy, tough, and, with her younger sister, into staging and photographing scenes of death. They’ve made a pact about dying together. In early October, on the night she has her first period, which is also the night of a full moon, a werewolf bites Ginger. Within a few days, some serious changes happen to her body and her temperament. Her sister Brigitte, 15, tries to find a cure with the help of Sam, a local doper. As Brigitte races against the clock, Halloween and another full moon approach, Ginger gets scarier, and it isn’t just local dogs that begin to die. Written by <jhailey@hotmail.com>